Resolution
1954 Decision |
Illinois Commission on the 50th Anniversary Segregation/Desegregation: Fifty Years |
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Segregation/Desegregation |
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W. E. B. DuBois said that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. This analysis still fits the 21st century. The more things change the more things stay the same. The apparent permanence of this problem results from a failure to deal with the cause: the imputation of White superiority. As long as we refrain from confronting this cause the more we will walk in circles around it. In this the 50th year, of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, we would do well to consider our failure to deal with the phenomenon there. Let ‘s face it. We made a mistake with Brown by substituting segregation and discrimination for the imputation of White superiority and the value of White supremacy. While the Court's decision said that "the basis of segregation and "separate-but-equal” rests upon a concept of the inherent inferiority of the colored race" (James T. Patterson. Brown V Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy, N.Y. N. Y. Oxford University Press, 2001, 64), the problem of the imputed inherent superiority of the White race went untouched. Segregation is a symptom of this very worrisome problem. White superiority masquerades as color blind when whiteness is the only color it sees. In the 2002 elections, Roy Barnes, Democratic Governor of the state of Georgia, and Max Cleland, former Democratic Senator from Georgia, were defeated by rural Whites in an election along with Tom Murphy who had served in the Georgia State House for 42 years; 28 of them as speaker, because the three of them had supported the removal of the Confederate Flag from the state flag of Georgia. Everyone knows that the Confederate Flag is the Banner of White Supremacy, the heritage that its supporters want to maintain. No one is willing to play this race card. So we stand in chronic denial. In the African Americans' struggle for survival and autonomy" we have walked in a complete circle. After the. Civil War was the First Reconstruction (1865-1877), after which there was the First Jim Crow Period where the violation of African Americans' citizenship rights was legal, oppressive and overt. After the First Jim Crow there was the Second Reconstruction which started with Brown and ended with Bakke (1954 -1977 ). We are now in the Period of the Second Jim Crow where the violation of African Americans' socioeconomic rights are extra-legal, closeted and covert. Instead of an outright assault against White supremacy, we accommodated it. We allowed desegregation policies which reinforced its claim, 80 percent White and 20 percent Black, identifying tipping points when there were too many Blacks in a school making Whites uncomfortable. We allowed the Court to say that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal for Blacks, but not for Whites. Separate White educational facilities were not considered inherently unequal, better equipped, better staffed, better maintained. These characteristics made the playing field unequal. So instead of destroying the imputation of White superiority, Brown reinforced it. Following then were policies sure to fail, firing of Black principals and teachers, busing of Black children into hostile White neighborhoods, and the flight of Whites from the cities to avoid living with and certainly going to school with Black children. At the same time when we were agreeing to the proposition that anything all Black was bad, we had our own excellent Black colleges, churches, universities, organizations and institutions. |
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Brown vs. Board of Education |
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| Supporters of Brown were especially excited because segregation in public education had powerfully buttressed Jim Crow, the state-sponsored, constitutionally protected system of racial discrimination and segregation that deliberately disadvantaged more than 10 million black people in the South and parts of the border states. The system stigmatized them, cut them off from avenues of opportunity, and in most case consigned them to inferior social, economic and political status. (xvi). As Marshall emphasized, segregation was as damaging as inequality-perhaps even more so. It shunted black students from the mainstream, isolating them and depriving them from association or competition with whites. A people set apart, blacks in the South could not be sure how bright, how competent, how worthy they might be. Some clearly wondered: were they, as whites maintained, inadequate or inferior. (xvii). |
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JCI was supported by a network of terrorism protected by the law and the courts. Mostly, Black people accommodated it or ran away. The first plaintiffs sought equality not desegregation. Levi Pearson, a farmer and parent of three children in Clarendon County, South Carolina, wanted only to have buses to carry his children to school in 1948. 23). "Brown focused on state sponsored segregation in the schools and did not maintain that all racial classifications (as, for instance, laws against interracial marriage) were unreasonable and therefore impermissible. It did not proclaim that the Constitution was color-blind." (xxiii) Many Blacks -including Zora Neale: Thurston did not like the fact that Brown insinuated that anything all-Black was inferior. (xxvi) It is really too much to expect Marshall and his attorneys to challenge White supremacy when they hesitated to confront segregation at first dealing only with the inequality part of separate but equal. Segregation was an integral part of the maintenance of White supremacy and few liberals even of today were advocates of the abolition of White supremacy. So the assault against segregation was the beginning of the chopping away at it. Fighting segregation was a dangerous avocation. Levi Pearson could not find anyone to rent him a harvester after he filed his suit in Clarendon County, South Carolina, so his crops died in the field. Reverend Joseph Albert DeLaine and his wife who stood up for Pearson lost their teaching jobs. Many would be plaintiffs did not want to be sacrificial lambs on the alter of integration. They simply wanted something better for their children. Mixing with Whites was not appealing to them. Brown vs. Board, 1954, did overturn Plessy vs. Ferguson, 1896 which stated that the assumption that the "enforced separation .of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority is not by reason .of anything found in the act passed by the Louisiana legislature but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it." (66-67). Why would Blacks be separated from Whites in the first place if, not because Whites found something about them which was negative? Who had the power to impose separation? Clearly, everybody understood it was the preservation of White supremacy. . The reaction to Brown was angry and violent. Between 1954-1959 there were 210 recorded acts of White violence against Black people in the South, including six murders, twenty-nine assaults with firearms, forty-four beatings and sixty bombings. (87). Throughout this time, Whites defended their atrocities with accusations against Black men as sexually aggressive males looking for White women. That White supremacy angle exists today from the Scottsboro Boys of 1933, Emmett Till of 1953, O.J. Simpson, 1994 to Kobe Bryant of 2004. Even though White males have been the sexual aggressors against Black women, this reverse sexual action was constantly argued. Patterson notes, " Perhaps. . .these parents harbored deep, scarcely conscious doubts about the durability of white supremacy-and therefore about their ability in the long run to maintain their social and economic superiority over people of color (88). On the other hand, holding Black people down offered unmerited opportunities to Whites, eliminated competition for jobs in the capitalist economy, gave Whites undeserved affirmative action and conferred upon them untold benefits and privileges which they had not earned. The Supreme Court had mandated that schools be desegregated with all deliberate speed which really meant "Whenever you want to do it. Added to this dilemma, in 1955 Judge John Parker, ruling for a three man federal court in South Carolina in the case of Briggs v: Elliott, ruled that the Supreme Court did not mean that "states must mix persons of different races in the public schools. . . What it has decided…is that a state may not deny any person on account of race the right to attend any school that it maintains… "The Constitution, in other words, does not require integration. . .It merely forbids the Use of governmental power to enforce segregation," (85). Compliance in the South proceeded at a snail's pace between 1955 and the late 1960s. It was the direct action of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) that fired up desegregation in public schools in the South. Some argued that the White backlash isolated White moderates and "further racialized southern politics and halted incipient amelioration of JC practices. In so doing massive southern resistance retarded the possibility of gradual, more peaceful progress and exposed the impotence of the Court as an agent of social change." Patterson describes it in this way, "Only by this circuitous, unintended, highly divisive and very slow process, this backlash argument holds, may Brown and Brown II be said to have accomplished much racial mixing in southern schools. Overheated southern resistance, followed by outraged black reactions and civil rights legislation with teeth-not unenforceable Court decisions of the 1950s-finally advanced significant change." (114-115). BusingThe decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969) set a standard for "all deliberate speed." The Supreme Court said that the obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools." These were schools in which "no person is to be effectively excluded from any school because of race or color." (154) Swann vs. Mecklenburg permitted busing which was the next source of White outrage. Many Whites fled from the schools but most parents stayed put in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Patterson says, "ln 1984 President Ronald Reagan came to the city and denounced busing as the social experiment nobody wants. He expected enthusiastic applause, but received only silence."(159). Now, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina was once touted as the most successful desegregated school district in the U.S. On January 21, 2003, Greg Winter wrote that dozens of Charlotte schools have basically .changed color in the months since the appeals court lifted the desegregation order. In Charlotte White parents filed suit in 1997 contending that their children were being discriminated against because they could not go to schools of their choice. A federal appeals court ruled in their favor in 2001, lifting the district's plan. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case last year, making this fall the first in three decades in which the system did not use race to help determine where children went to school. (New York Times. Greg Winter. Schools Resegregate, Study Finds. January 21, 2003). Busing was never popular with many Black parents either since their children were most often sent to hostile White neighborhoods, trips requiring long rides. Parents had difficulty making school meetings and conferences. Their children were made to feel that their neighborhood was bad. In too many cases, Black children were tracked in the new schools in the White neighborhoods so there was resegregation inside the school in the classrooms. The Supreme Court began to tighten the bonds around desegregation remedies in 1974 in Milliken vs. Bradley. Detroit had proposed a city suburban plan to alleviate the extreme Segregation of Detroit. In Milliken Chief Burger wrote, the notion that school district lines may be casually ignored or treated as a mere administrative convenience is contrary to the history of public education in our country.” He agreed that disparate treatment of White and Negro students “occurred within the Detroit system. If the suburban had also practiced discrimination of that sort, an interdistrict remedy might be in order. But he found no intent to segregate in the fifty-three suburban towns, The proposed interdistrict remedy was therefore wholly impermissible.” Milliken was the first key decision to go against Brown and it is now the law of the land. Everybody remembers Ruby Bridges who integrated an all white school in New Orleans, Louisiana when she was six years old in 1960. Whites threw eggs and tomatoes at her. Two days later Whites rioted and beat Black people on the streets. Advocates of desegregation found little to cheer about in New Orleans during the next few years. In the 1961-1962 school year, stern placement guidelines resulted in acceptance to White schools of only twelve Black students, who attended six schools with 951 Whites. One of these Blacks was Ruby Bridges. In New Orleans several years ago Manning Marable cites the attempt to rename the George Washington Elementary School for Dr. Charles Drew. The name change solicited enthusiastic support from the school’s students, teachers and parents. However, when it became a public knowledge, according to Marable, that George Washington was being dumped in favor of a black man many local Whites were outraged. Marable says, “Whiteness imposes blinders that shut off the full spectrum of social reality, the shared experiences of people from different racialized backgrounds in the making of a common history.” Only that history Manning Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life, N.Y.: BasicCivitas Publishers, 2002, 7-8). ConclusionRace continues to be the most divisive issue in our society because of the twin myths. In addition to our failure to confront the imputation of White superiority as one of the highest values of our culture, we refuse to deal with the ambiguity of race. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) states in its report, The Race Concept: Results of an inquiry, that |
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the concept of race is unanimously regarded by anthropologists as a classificatory device providing a zoological frame within which the various groups of mankind may be arranged any by means of which studies of evolutionary processes can be facilitated. In its anthropological sense, the word “race” should be reserved for groups of mankind possessing well-developed and primarily heritable physical differences from other groups. Many populations can be so classified but, because of the complexity of human history, there are also many populations which cannot easily be fitted into a racial classification., (Bruno, L. Racism: Opposing viewpoints. St. Paul, MN Greenhaven Press, 1986,221. |
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In the United States this definition is applied without the caveat. For example, race here usually means a classification on the basis of skin color, hair type and head/eye nose/lip size and shape. Berry and Blassingame (1982. Long Memory, 126 )state that "Fugitive slaves, for example, were frequently described as having straight hair and complexion so nearly white that a stranger would suppose there was no negro blood in him" or as having light sandy hair, blue eyes, ruddy complexion; he is so nearly white as to easily pass for a white man."(1968,133) They conclude that race is determined by visibility and reputation. DuBois concluded that race was defined by a group of contradictory forces, illogical facts and irreconcilable tendencies. Look at the case of Essie Mae Washington Williams, Strom Thurmond's daughter. She was in chronic denial of her father until he died. In spite of his aggressive defense of White supremacy and the oppression of Black people, she was the supreme accommodationist. Nowhere in its description of the situation did the national press declare that Strom Thurmond who was 22 raped Essie's mother, Carrie Butler, who was 16. Unlike Kobe Bryant, they declared it an "affair" as though Carrie Butler had equal standing with Thurmond in the racist Black South Carolina of that time. Our toleration of that description show the depth of accommodation that the Black community is willing to exhibit. Her case stresses the hypocrisy of the White supremacy position on race mixing. Affirmative action designed to address the effects of (JCI) is now called reverse is crimination and chances for its use as an effective remedy against White privileges which rest on the basis of claims to White superiority languish. The large African American middle class which now exists can be attributed to affirmative action programs of the 1970s and 1980s. I would never have been chosen dean of the school of education at DePaul University had not an African American been provost and another assistant provost. University positions are awarded according to kinship, friendship and political networks now. Because Whites have long dominated the selection process, Blacks need not apply. Even when Blacks have better qualifications and experience, Whites get the jobs because they "fit in." Cheryl! Harris in her seminal piece, Whiteness as Property, in the Harvard Law Review, June, 1993 says the following. |
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The Supreme Court's rejection of affirmative action programs on the grounds that race-conscious remedial measures are unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment-the very constitutional measure designed to guarantee equality for blacks-is based on the Court's chronic refusal to dismantle the institutional protection of benefits for whites that have been based on white supremacy and maintained at the expense of blacks. As a result, the parameters of appropriate remedies are not dictated by the scope of the injury to the subjugated, but by the extent of the infringement on settled expectations of whites. These limits to remediation are grounded in the perception that the existing order based on white privilege is not only just there but also is a property interest worthy of protection. Thus under this assumption, it is not only the interests of individual whites who challenge affirmative action that are protected; the interests of whites as whites are enshrined and institutionalized as a property interest that accords them a higher, status than any individual claim to relief. |
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Equity has been lost because of the apathy and despondency in the African American community. Now instead of equity the focus is on cultural diversity. Other minorities who have never suffered from the legacy of slavery have become preferred. In many fields Asian are the preferred minority. Even though many immigrants are not the descendants of slaves, if they are black in skin color they automatically enter the same inferior caste. This causes much discontent. This is particularly egregious to continental Africans, Caribbeans and others. Muhammad, Davis, Lui and Leondar-Wright argue that discrimination is still significant in the American society. "A 2003 study of job applications showed continue employer discrimination. Researchers at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sent fictitious responses to help wanted ads with either white sounding names (Emily Walsh, Brendan Baker) or black sounding names (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones). The White sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be invited for, an initial interview than applicants with Black sounding names. Black resumes weren't helped much by stronger credentials. Similarly, in 2003, a sociologist at Northwestern University, Devah Pager, sent White and Black men with and without criminal records to job interviews, and found that White applicants with prison records were more likely to be hired than Black applicants without one. I do not think I can say it better than Manning Marable: |
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The main pillars of structural racism throughout American history have been prejudice, power and privilege. By "prejudice" I mean a deep and unquestioned belief in the natural superiority of White people over nonwhites. In his 1920 essay, "The Souls of White Folk," W.E.B. DuBois described White supremacy as the belief "that every great soul the world ever saw was a White man's soul; that every great deed the world ever did was a White man's deed; that every great great dream the world ever sang was a White man’s dream.” A belief in the purity of whiteness demands-and is dependent on–the denigration of blackness.”
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The next struggle must take on White supremacy and the twin myths not just Black inferiority. Since racism has become a catchall phrase meaning nothing, we must supplant it with the true meaning of the word, White supremacy and the myth of White superiority. This will prevent us from dealing with symptoms. Whites must be stripped of all of the privileges which accrue to them because of the color of their skin. Until that is done, the playing field will never be level. |
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Illinois Commission on the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education Contact: Executive Director Ollie McLemore |